Boyer's army arrives to find the king has already killed himself

Destin records that for the sixteen years before 1820 the country was divided between a kingdom in the north and a republic in the south, and that after Petion's death Boyer emerged as president of the republic. Boyer launched an attack on the monarchy, but by the time his force reached the monarch, Christophe had taken his own life in the face of an impending coup by conspirators in his crumbling kingdom, and the once elusive region passed into Boyer's possession. Destin treats the reunification as the achievement that matters, arguing that before Boyer the country had not resolved its differences and that foreign powers hesitated to deal with a state split between a monarch and a president. The unification set the pattern, and with few interruptions the country has been a republic since.

In 1818 two French medical writers, Fournier and Begim, published an attack on Felix Pascalis of New York. They called him a man who had never really been a doctor at all. Then they went further and named his connection in Saint-Domingue with the insurgent leader they called the pious Romain and with the camp at Trou Coffy, accusing him of presiding over the killing of white civilians and the mutilation of their bodies. Pascalis demanded two thousand dollars in damages. He also wrote to Jean Deveze in Paris, who had run the fever hospital at Bush Hill in Philadelphia in 1793, and obtained from him a signed declaration in February 1820 that his conduct during the Trou Coffy affair had deserved glory. To make his case he set down in 1821 a long memoir of what he had seen, the Anecdote historique. That document, written to save a medical reputation in Manhattan, is one of the fullest eyewitness accounts of any 1791 insurgency in the colony.

France abolished slavery in its colonies in February 1794 without ever stating plainly that the slave trade was over. Napoleon Bonaparte restored both in 1802 and 1803. The traffic then became a theoretical question, because once war with Britain resumed the French lost Martinique and Santo Domingo in 1809 and Guadeloupe in 1810, and the Royal Navy blockaded the French coast. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815 the European powers declared their opposition to the trade while stopping short of prohibiting it. Bonaparte, briefly back in power during the Hundred Days, issued a decree of abolition in 1815 that had no effect on anything. The prohibition that finally held was a law of 15 April 1818, passed under the restored Bourbon monarchy. Even then several more years went by before agreements with Britain on searching suspect ships at sea gave that law any force in French waters.

In 1820 Haitian merchants complained in print that a foreigner settles in their country only for his own interest or his nation's, that this called for a response, and that a people whose wealth is being carried off ought to look to keeping it. In April 1821 a commercial circle made up only of Haitian merchants was founded in Port-au-Prince, all of them opposed to the foreign trading houses. Similar circles followed at Cap-Haitien and at Les Cayes. The meetings in the capital turned to politics, with the declared aim of controlling the acts of government through intelligent, capable and firm national action. Thomas Madiou, writing in the 1860s, called the founding of the circle an event and the only serious effort Haitian merchants ever made to throw off the yoke of foreign commerce. He recorded that no comparable attempt had been made since, and that national commerce in his own day was completely subjugated.